While creating my prototype application with use of iBeacon technology somehow I didn’t get the region monitoring to work.

The Beacon technology in iOS is based on two functions, startMonitoringForRegion and startRangingBeaconsInRegion if you only want to detect beacons when they are near and don’t have any detection when your app isn’t running then it’s fine to only use the Ranging function. When you want to make use of the background monitoring it is very important to also use the MonitorforRegion part.

When you have this in place the beacon region will be registered in your device and when background functionality is turned on in your iOS device the app delegate function will be used to fire your app in the background resulting in extra tasks to be fired. This way it’s possible to Range the beacons and if your close enough get the right localNotification.

I wonder how this iBeacon thing will explode in the coming months. Or if people will freak out on the localization options.

When you monitor for a region it becomes possible to do a call-back to a central server to identify someone is close to a certain iBeacon. Which in case results in location information. Information you would normally not give is now suddenly available to the app developer.

After creating iBeacons with a few Raspberry Pi computers I finally received the first dedicated hardware beacons to experiment with. I didn’t go for the “Estimote” beacons because of the way how they constructed the beacons.

iBeacon hardware with TI Chipset

Now it’s always a challenge to configure newly built hardware from scratch, and especially if the chinese manufacturer doesn’t give any further information except of the chipset used in the beacons.

The past weeks I’ve been looking into prototyping an iPhone application again with the goal of detecting iBeacons and using the proximity to trigger events in an application.

I’ll start writing a bit more here to document the process, since there aren’t many good informational sites on how to start with iBeacons. It’s probably because not many people want to share their experience but I hope many people experimenting with this will share their work and ideas more.